Monday, August 6, 2007

Family fun? Not so much...

I love Family Fun magazine and have been subscribing to it for over two years now. It’s really cheap and it’s loaded with lots of really cool crafts and other great ideas for family fun! The crafts look so cool but I never seem to get around to doing them. A lot of them seem a little too advanced for my kids but I found one that one I thought would be fairly easy to do. We made this birdfeeder!

And the craft was fairly easy to do for the kids because Dan and I did most of it. (Well, correction…Dan did most of it.) All I really had to do was buy the bird seed (the cheapest I could find was $1.87 at Wal-mart) and four wooden spoons ($1.25 at Wal-Mart - of course). Daddy took over from there.

Dan cut circles out of the plastic bottles while the kids pestered him to help. Of course Exact-O knives don't make great toys for kids so they just watched and whined (and hammed it up for the camera!) during this step.

The cheap wooden spoons I bought at Wal-Mart weren’t all the same length so Dan had to use his saw to shorten them. He was pretty excited about having something to saw and so were the kids. This extra step which could have been avoided all together was the most fun for the kids. They loved “helping” Daddy use the saw.

It was finally time to pour the birdseed into the feeder! The kids could actually help with this step. We filled Sarah’s inside and quickly realized this was an outside step due to the mess it made! I am still finding birdseed on my kitchen floor!

Then Dan inserted little hooks in the bottle caps and we hung them on a tree and ... TA-DAH! The finished product!

Dan and I were very happy with how they turned out. The kids really seemed to care less though. I suppose this craft is for older kids but it looked so neat and easy that I wanted to try it out. All in all the craft took about an hour to complete and the kids spent a lot of this hour complaining that there wasn’t anything for them to do and there really wasn’t a lot of hands on time for them in this craft. I really thought they would be more excited when we got to watch the birds eating from the feeders.

However, the birds weren’t thrilled with my cheap birdseed and aren’t coming to eat it. After a week of hanging in the tree all of the birdseed was still in the feeder so I reluctantly purchased a slightly higher quality birdseed. After a day in the feeder it too appears to be uneaten and completely ignored by the birds. Hmmm…wonder if it’s the design of the birdfeeder? I’m not sure what it is but we are very disappointed that the birds aren’t using it and I'm not going to buy any more birdseed!

This isn’t going to be the end of crafting for me and the kids. I am still on the look out for an easy and fun craft for the kids. They are getting tired of painting and coloring and there are still 4 looooonnnnng weeks left before school starts so leave me a comment and let me know if you have any ideas. And check back here because I have something up my sleeve for all of my left over birdseed! And no…it won’t be a recipe!